Chattanooga Pulse

Not all of my dreams are of dining with glossy black-eyed corpses or porcelain babies bleeding out as they cry, you know.  Sometimes they are in the form of cartoons; others, however are their own parodies, and like all my columns, based on real life events.

(Fade In)

OFFICER (voiceover):  Hixson, shit. I’m still only in Hixson. Every time I think I’m going to wake up back in East Lake. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I’d wake up and there’d be nothing… I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I’ve been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute the Crips squat in the projects they get stronger. Each time I look around the walls move in a little tighter.

I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn’t even know it yet. Hours away and hundreds of meters up a creek that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable and plugged straight into Brazzell. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Anna Brazzell’s memory; any more than being back in Hixson was an accident.

CHIEF:  Officer, you heard of Ms. Anna Brazzell?

OFFICER:  No, sir. Not personally.

CHIEF:  You have worked a lot on your own, haven’t you?

OFFICER:  Yes, sir. I have.

CHIEF:  Your report specifies patrol, intelligence, counter-intelligence, with Fox Team.

OFFICER:  I’m not presently disposed to discuss these operations, sir.

CHIEF:  Did you not work for the CIA in Alton Park?

OFFICER:  No, sir.

CHIEF:  I thought we’d have a bite of lunch while we talk. I hope you brought a good appetite with you. You have a bad forehead wound there, are you wounded?

OFFICER:  A little fishing accident on R&R, sir.

CHIEF:  Fishing on R&R… But you’re feeling fit, ready for duty?

OFFICER:  Yes, Chief. Very much so, sir.

CHIEF:  Todd, would you play that tape for the officer, please. Listen carefully.

(On tape):  October 9th, 0430 hours, sector Union 2.

CHIEF:  This was monitored out of Red Bank. This has been verified as Ms. Brazzell’s voice.

ANNA BRAZZELL (on tape):  I watched a nickel crawl along the edge of a parking meter. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a parking meter, and paying it.

(On tape):  11th transmission, December 30th, 0500 hours, sector Union 1.

BRAZZELL (on tape):  We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Ticket after ticket, meter after meter, parking space after parking space, Police Service Tech after Police Service Tech. And they call me a double parker. What do you call it when the double parkers accuse the double parkers? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful for those who lie. Those city ordinances. I hate them. How I hate them…

CHIEF:  Anna Brazzell was one of the most outstanding waitresses this city has ever produced. She was a brilliant and outstanding in every way and she was a good woman, too. Humanitarian woman, woman of wit, of humor. She joined the Big River Grille. After that her ideas, her parking methods have become unsound…unsound.

Now she’s crossed into Red Bank with her Wait Staff army, who worships the woman like a goddess and follows every order however ridiculous. You see, officer, in this war, things get confused out there, power, ideals, the old morality, and practical parking necessity.

Out there with these natives it must be a temptation to be god. Because there’s a conflict in every human heart between the rational and the irrational, between feeding the meter and ignoring it, between good and evil. The good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’, and we park wherever and however we want to, without due payment or regard for others.

Every woman has got a breaking point. You and I have. Anna Brazzell has reached hers. And very obviously, she has gone insane.

OFFICER:  Yes sir, very much so sir. Obviously insane.

CHIEF:  Your mission is to proceed up the Mountain Creek in a Chattanooga Ducks boat. Pick up Brazzell’s path at the old Orange Hut, follow it, learn what you can along the way. When you find her. infiltrate her team by whatever means available and terminate Brazzell’s parking command.

OFFICER:  Terminate? Brazzell’s car?

CHIEF:  She’s out there parking without any decent restraint. Totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct, and she owes us nearly thirty grand in back fines for Chrissakes and we can’t get the first nickel out of her. She’s making us look like horses’ asses, and she is still in the office commanding her troops.

MAYOR’S COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR:  Terminate with extreme prejudice.

CHIEF: You understand, officer…that this operation does not exist, nor will it ever exist.

(Alone, in the cruiser):

OFFICER (voiceover):  How many people had I already collected fines from? There was that one I know about for sure. Close enough to throw their last check in my face. But this time it was a local and a woman. That wasn’t supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Hell…charging a woman with improper parking in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn’t know what I’d do when I found her.

(Fade Out)

(Francis Ford Coppola would recognize this entirely as parody, and so should you.  As for the names cited…purely coincidental.  No real person could be this obnoxious, after all.)

When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he is an occasional student at UTC, an up and coming carpenter, auto mechanic, prominent boating enthusiast, and spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.